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The key lacking then was commitment knowingly to stay with the company. I wanted greener pastures then, with hot men, and last December, I wanted to move to SF by summer.

The only reason I have the shares I do is that they were given to me without asking as part of my compensation package. In fact, it could've been even more shares, but I opted for more salary.

And I did not have to decide on the options vesting now. They were given without cost at the time given.

[cut off]:30 How can I learn to commit + when? I just never feel like committing for the long term, but prefer a staged approach. To me, in December, 6 months was too long to commit.

They key is to find something to commit to and do it, or is it to realize what I've got and not give it up easily.

[cut off]:45 Get ready for bed.

Sat June 27 '87

Fitfull sleep. Wierd dreams. Probably due to withdrawal for safety of coding, and seeing big mistake of not investing in ESPP.

[cut off]:15 Would've had to sell some bonds to cover cost of ESPP purchases, $3000. Had I done that last year I'd've gotten favorable cap gains rate of 20% and avoided the downturn in bond market.

Also interesting parallel that I seem to make these mistakes of not getting enough out of Microsoft just when I'm producing the most important products. 6502 Basic and 8080 Cobol were key. But I've made most of my money while doing products unimportant to Microsoft, but important to me, namely Sort (to tie up language and say goodbye to systems) + Pers Acct.